A microphone is an acoustic transducer converting sound pressure signals to equivalent electrical signals. This electrical equivalent of the sound is generally used in bidirectional telecommunications or for later playback. Historically, this acoustic capture has been done completely in the analog domain. The improvement of audio capture technology has led to digital microphones, particularly microphones that output pulse density modulated (PDM) digital signals.
Processing of the captured audio signals to improve or enhance the desired signal is used with bi-directional telecommunications and recording. This aspect of audio signal enhancement supports new use cases in particular to meet demands of compact size, ease of integration and increasing needs to operate in noisy conditions while still providing quality audio with reduced noise.
Such signal processing is usually conducted by a combination of a codec and a digital signal processor (DSP) engine, wherein the DSP functionality may be embedded in the codec hardware or is implemented in hardware external to the codec and is supplied by data from the codec. Furthermore, such processed data is then provided to the consuming application that runs on the same or another processor to facilitate a recording or telecommunication objective.
Previous approaches include multiple intermediate processing integrated circuit chips, which increases the complexity, size, and power requirements of the approach. By “chip” and as used herein, it is meant a piece of silicon. These previous approaches also increase the cost of the system. All of these problems have resulted in some user dissatisfaction with previous approaches.
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